


The Right Names For Things

by Fells



Category: The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Genre: F/F, Missing Scene, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-22 23:08:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16607165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fells/pseuds/Fells
Summary: Even if Aurdwynn cannot be ruled, it can be sacrificed. That's the way of many precious things.





	The Right Names For Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sternerstuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternerstuff/gifts).



Baru takes the lesson of Xate Yawa's fatal ledger to heart. Secrets on parchment will burn like anything—or any _one_ —else; they can be stolen back or silenced. Therefore she prefers that the accounting she keeps on Tain Hu never leaves the lockbox of her own thoughts. With her secretary in ashes (she doesn't flinch from that thought now, to her shame), she decides that all of her observations will be compiled secretly, a reference list recited in an endless, murmuring loop.

One of the first entries:

_Tain Hu smiles when she knows she's being watched._

Riding out of the main camp gate beside her, filthy and statuesque on a borrowed black mare, Tain Hu looks out at the lean borderland of Vultjag-on-Lyxaxu. Her expression is tranquil and absent, so Baru stares at her without subtlety for a time—then, thoughtfully, she also turns to face the shriveled hills rolling on and on ahead.

_~~Tain Hu smiles when she knows she's being watched.~~ she is using that against you by now._

* * *

Baru had risen as early as she could manage to consciously shirk all responsibility and join Tain Hu as she went on her rounds of the pickets. The days always feel too long when there is no march; but now, here, waiting on the threshold of a bold sweep into the greater north of Aurdwynn before winter, camp life is excruciating. Checking the lines seems like a productive excuse, at least, to ride out on firm and unchurned ground.

Nosing her nervous gray gelding through the jackpines and sweet-smelling sedge on all the fringes of visible forest, she trails Tain Hu in a circle around the whole of the Coyote Rebellion. To her delight and horror, Tain Hu steals them toward the pickets from a dozen hidden positions, closer and closer and _shockingly_ near to the trenches when they tie the horses out of sight and approach on foot, until finally a sentry waves them off in salute. They are dark shapes, sidling up to scraps and leavings like true coyotes; lucky that the watchmen find them familiar. (Arrangements have been made with the captains, Baru assumes, or she would have hoped—hoped!—to see more crossbows raised at her face.)

_Tain Hu can show you how to be hard and still have people who wish to follow you. also: perhaps she is watching when you think you're alone._

No matter how early or late she is spotted, the duchess only raises her own clenched glove in answer. The soldiers have been calling her The Fist of The Fairer Hand and those who see it raise a cry as she dashes on, her features sharpening with speed as if the wind is a whetstone. Plunging after her doggedly, Baru begins to fancy that she feels the residue of a boiling, manic energy, smells it crackling ahead of her against the autumn chill.

_and she might be mad. utterly mad._

How alarming and magnificent to see her set loose upon a purpose of her choosing. And how remarkable to witness the change that begins in her when the treeline has finally been scouted to her satisfaction. Before Baru's eyes, the hunter's madness goes out of her slowly; but it is a cooling of focus rather than the loss of it. Vividly, Baru thinks of a copper bowl, burned clean and left singing with dissipating heat. She thinks of paper temples, ready to fuel the flames of revolution.

* * *

They linger together on a low hillock some distance from camp, wearied and warmed by their finished labours. A sleepier sort of peace comes into Tain Hu's vigilance and Baru knows she is thinking of what it will mean to go forth from Vultjag's borders again so soon. She might never return, her body and blood left to water some old rival's domain. Baru understands, even wishes that she did not need to ask her to endure the hardship of it. She watches Tain Hu's eyes pass over the land like a golden scythe, carving over the patchy copses of forest, the dry meadows and silver suggestion of mountains far away; and, closer, she still takes care to assess the guided chaos of a shift change at half the pickets. She narrows her eyes at some minor confusion there, clucks her tongue so derisively that her black mare shifts uncertainly beneath her.

With some effort, Baru keeps her mental ledger closed. She looked out upon that same vista once, sailing on _Lapatiere_. She had watched Taranoke bleed out of existence in the ship's wake, suddenly powerless to stop the movements of an engine she had built with her own hands. She remembers that moment of perfect grief and wants to respect its privacy.

"The last time we looked over Vultjag together," Baru says, bracing herself to share some form of that story, "you told me the truth."

A very different time, she thinks; a few years and an era ago. Every shadow had seemed to veil the glitter of a dagger, and all the forest wreathing Vultjag-at-the-keep hissed and seethed before them like a deep green ocean in the twilight as its duchess confessed forgery and fraud to her honoured guest, the Imperial Accountant Baru Cormorant.

"Yes." Tain Hu smiles, sudden and feral. "I remember. And I must do the same thing again."

_stop feeding her your ideas._

"Now?" Baru squeaks, her internal script cut short.

_stop feeding her your ideas._

"When I was very young," Tain Hu says, "I wanted an osprey."

Baru falls silent.

"Your name isn't complete," Tain Hu explains. "You were Cormorant, and then Fisher and The Fairer Hand. But now you ask us to leave my lands and risk the teeth of winter, and so I know something else about you. Your other name is Osprey. You have eyes that slit the water's surface and count all the prey to be speared from the very throne of the sky." She smiles in the shape of a merciless hook. "I always preferred the longbow to fishing poles and jigs so I was only on the Vultsniada occasionally as a child. Osprey were a special sight, and one day I saw one and said I would take it for the aviary. We were knee-deep in the river, helping bring in the nets, and my mother Ko splashed me in the face for that. _We do not imprison our birds,_ she said. _Those ones are never happy away from the rivers and the sea, so you must love them from here."_

With that, Tain Hu claps her mare's neck and sits back with a contented sigh, watching the Coyote camp curl inward with the coming of dusk. Its many parts move like a single living creature before them, settling slowly into sleep.

* * *

Back in Vultjag, _after_ Baru had spied the truth of the fiat takeover gambit but _before_ she fled the lands of a traitor, Tain Hu toured her through countless musty rooms in the old stone keep that had been shut up for decades. Some of them, she claimed, held ghosts. Mostly there were just gray tapestries and dusty beds disintegrating into oaken frame skeletons, but stepping into the darkness of those gaping doorways quickly taught Baru that she believed in divination. The shadows swallowed her and she knew: people were still in those rooms. (Still omen-fearing at the time, she neither noted this down nor opted to mention it to the duchess. Imagine the response: _you_ would _apprehend the dead more easily that you appreciate the people living around you._ )

When they finally opened a room with a window facing the bright, leaping River Vultsniada, Tain Hu had said, "Would you tell me something about Taranoke, Your Excellence? Something only you would know."

So she did want to speak of ghosts. So, even before the mental ledger, Baru had occasion to think: _Tain Hu chooses the right names._

Baru answered honestly. She did not share her deepest secret, of course, or any of the little tragic ones that had come to harbour after the landing of red sails on Taranoke's shore. Baru said: "A volcano formed the island, so there's no calculated reason for the shape of it. I suppose my—" and she struggled briefly, irritated, with the translation to Aphalone, "—heart-friends would know this too but there are hidden places, black rock tide pools where the water matches the temperature of your body. We used to meet there, and I'd tell them stories. I'd explain what was happening to our world, our home. I mean," and it was caution that caught her before the growing ache in her heart, "I tried to explain."

Framed in the dim light, Tain Hu was listening raptly. The gold in her irises glittered, too close and fascinated. A codebreaker's eyes, Baru had thought, and must have set her jaw a certain way; the duchess nodded, _we're done here_ , and motioned to the hallway. When she grasped Baru's shoulders from behind, steered her out and slammed the door decisively behind them, it had even seemed like an unspoken agreement rather than a threat.

* * *

Through winter the Coyote grows fat in influence, against all odds.

Baru never meant to write a novel on Tain Hu but she finds herself entangled now, the two of them riding side by side for leagues, pitching tents together in the uncertain Midlands, lurching toward the abstract goal of a free Aurdwynn. Very much like true coyotes, she thinks, and tries not to fall through the thinning ice of her ambitions into the deep, hungry currents of that bursting ledger.

_too close to her people. tics arrows a little to her left on the loose. ties her hair up too tight on the march; just let me do it. knows when and how to be harsh. Tain Hu is dangerous. even greedy birds admire her (me, Yawa, falcons, etc.). you need her._

By chance, they startle a group of ptarmigan while scouting around the broad concept of "camp", late in the evening after a long march. Baru has an arrow nocked loose on her bow, resting under her hand on the gelding's gray shoulder, and she takes a bird out of the dull sky in a smooth, thoughtless motion. Food for a soldier, she thinks, and then remembers to mourn the little life. After trotting over to claim and clean her catch, she turns and mounts up again and finds Tain Hu smiling at her.

_~~Tain Hu smiles when she knows she's being watched. she is using that against you by now.~~ Tain Hu smiles when she is looking at me._

Sometimes her own cleverness is a burden. Since her ledger is not printed, Baru cannot hurl it into fire or water and wipe it from existence. She must repeat to herself everything she has observed to protect herself, and none of it should be sweet or thrilling; but every time, it is.

She looks to Tain Hu as they walk their horses back over Erebog's stony land, brown and ugly in the early thaw. She wants a show of boredom or disdain but instead the duchess is watching her with quiet affection. At the same time, the low slung sun leaps up on her iron shoulder and glowers back at Baru like a ruffled falcon.

It suddenly hurts to look her and Baru starts to throw up an arm, twist away—then she stops herself. Instead, she shades her eyes and gives a silent, sardonic salute to her Incrastic conditioning. She will look into the sun; she would look into the very eye of Vultjag if its duchess was smiling behind it, and let blindness take her. She had known that from the start. She'd known it when the wolf queen broke from cover and circled her at Cattlson's gala, cutting off her escape before the game had even begun.

_it will always hurt to look at Tain Hu._

**Author's Note:**

> _Imuira, kuye lam._


End file.
